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Engineers of a Solar Empire - Akkan Battlecruiser

If you read nothing else in this description, read this:

This ship is MASSIVE. For real. It's larger than you think. It will cause your game to bog down and your computer to get hot. That's the nature of this beast. Be patient through the loading screens and don't be surprised if Space Engineers just decides to quit. It does that sometimes. I wouldn't recommend this ship for anyone with less than 16 gigs of RAM.

Oh, and make sure block limits are turned off before you try to make any changes. Otherwise if you destroy a block you won't be able to place it again.


Okay, the description proper:

A recreation, to a realistic scale, of the outer hull of the Akkan Battlecruiser from Sins of a Solar Empire. I started this project because I'm interested in huge-scale spaceships -- the kind that are basically floating cities. I love watching them cruise through space. I love watching them in combat. I love watching the massive structural failures as they are destroyed. The Akkan is my favorite ship from a game where all the ships are great. I love the aesthetic - it's boxy and practical, built for space and designed to stay there, but it still looks like it could sail around if you dropped it in an ocean. Ships like these kind of capture my imagination -- what would it be like to live on this ship? For everything you know to be inside this (huge) pressurized box, with just hard vacuum and darkness outside?

I knew this would be a big ship when I started, but I had at least some hope that by the time I finished the hull, I might have some idea of what would go inside. Well, I finished the hull, and I still have no idea how to fill the empty space. There is a LOT of it. I don't really have the time to keep working on this ship, so I'm turning it over to the community. Use it however you want. When I originally conceived the idea, I thought (perhaps naively) it could maybe be used as the setting for an RP server. If you want to try that, go for it, and may God have mercy on your server. Crash it into a planet and create a scenario to explore it. Use it as the mothership in a fleet. Store your other ships inside it. Just credit me if you use it for something else you release on the Workshop.

Specs:

Length: 615 blocks (1.538 km; 0.955 miles)
Width: 95 blocks (237.5 m)
Height: 152 blocks (380 m)

Mass: 986,035 metric tons (9.86 x 10^8 kg)
Number of blocks: 320,534

Forward thrust: 1.472 GN (yes, that's giganewtons) (46 Titan thrusters @ 32MN each)

Max forward acceleration: ~1.49m/s^2 (0.15 g)


Features:
- Hull of single-layer, heavy armor
- Hand-crafted. I didn't export a model file or anything for this. Just a lot of hours with SE open on my main computer and Sins open on my laptop for reference.
- Hand-painted trim and decals
- Forward and limited reverser thrusters
- Two hangar bays, one extra large for colonization ships, and one for fighters with gravity catapult and toggleable blast doors
- Two biodomes, one main one at top amidships, and one smaller one located farther forward
- 3x3-bore main cannon, suitable for properly centered 2x2 mass driver slugs, or maybe 3x3 if you can get them to fit
- Only two mods: Titan thrusters (because vanilla thrusters are ugly as hell, and grouped Titans are closer to the original Akkan aesthetic) and Piston Pack (for the hangar blast door, which I guess isn't strictly necessary, I just think it's cool)
- You CAN copy-and-paste it, or make it a blueprint. Again, BE PATIENT. The game can handle the load (so long as you have enough RAM), but it will take awhile. I'm releasing it as a world so that the ship exists free-floating before it's pasted anywhere.
- I'm not certain, but I believe this is the largest hand-crafted ship on the Space Engineers Workshop. So it has that going for it, which is nice.
- Complimentary fighter, modeled after the TEC fighters from Sins. It's in the fighter bay on the lower port side.


Lacking:
- The vast majority of the interior is just empty space. There's a basic floor under the biodomes, a rudimentary fighter bay, and a couple of reactors just so the ship is nominally powered. I did have a basic bridge at one point high up on the front slanted window part, but it was made with a bunch of modded blocks from way back before DX11, so I removed them.
- Gyroscopes. Believe me, I tried. The number of gyros I needed drove the polygon count so high that it crashed SE. You might have better luck with modded gyros.
- Maneuvering thrusters. The Akkan from Sins doesn't have these, and I was more concerned with creating a good-looking showpiece than something that works practically in SE. If you want to make this flyable, you'll probably want to use Titans or equivalent. In fact, you'll probably want to increase the number of forward and reverse thrusters anyway, as .15 g is slow, even for this monster.
- Docking ports/airlocks. I was considering trying to find a good-looking spot where I could put in an attachment spot for a gangway. Then I started to think about the size of a shipyard that could service this ship, and I stopped considering docking ports.
- Oxygen. The open spaces are so large the oxygen-pressurization algorithm tends to choke. Making small, closed-off rooms DOES work, however. I was able to seal off the top biodome and pressurize it. Just be patient, because the algorithm only searches for new rooms every 15-30 seconds. And because of the scale, you're going to need a lot of vents.


To use the catapult with the fighter:
Get in the fighter.
Bind the group "Catapult hook" on/off to your hotbar.
Remote into the Akkan's terminal.
Find the block group "Flight Deck Catapult" and turn it on. This will turn on the grav generators, so don't go outside at this point!
Make sure the blast doors are open ("Flight Deck Blast Doors")
Hit the catapult hook to launch; turn it off once you're clear of the fighter bay.
If you're really gutsy, you can try using the catapult in reverse, to slow you down as you enter the bay at speed. I am not liable for any damage caused to your fighter or the fighter bay surface.